As directed by Sendijarević, shot by Emo Weemhoff and edited by Lot Rossmark, “Sweet Dreams” is aestheticized within a millimeter of its life. The movie is shot in the squarish, 4×3 “Academy” ratio, mostly through wide-angle lenses that cartoonishly distort people and objects (especially when the camera shifts position quickly). Almost every establishing shot is symmetrically framed, not in the manner of a Stanley Kubrick or Wes Anderson, but fetishistic fan art inspired by them. Objects and people within each shot are arranged like elements in a glassed-in art installation. The movie is a zoo with people in it. The movie observes its characters with coldly analytical, often withering precision, up to a point.
Then it all finally gives way to something more overtly lyrical and even dreamlike. The film seems to lose interest in satire and slapstick and takes more detours to present a startling, odd, often beautiful image or situation (often one involving the elemental forces: water, fire, wind, and soil). The story doesn’t so much end as stop, but only after delivering a series of moments and set pieces that are shot and edited (in one case, cross-cut) with a mysterious yet unexplained deliberateness that is a hallmark of expressionistic modern art.
Some of the flights of fancy in the final twenty minutes are so beautiful that they retroactively make the earlier parts of the film seem like an overbearing warmup to what’s truly special and memorable about the project. There’s a very long take near the end that’s as surprising and excessive-yet-perfect as one in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” where a man mops an entire bar floor while Booker T. and the MGs’ “Green Onion” plays out at full length. It could be that this is a filmmaker who becomes more vital and unique the more deeply she plugs into her subconscious and the more completely she surrenders to it.